Understanding Crowd Dynamics in Processions during Mass Religious Gatherings A case study of Shahi Snan in Kumbh Mela

Large people gatherings in public places exhibit crowd dynamics that are quite complex. Such mass events with high densities are fraught with potentially serious consequences if not understood and managed properly. In mass religious processions, the participants in the crowd are emotional and mostly impulsive and often crowd disasters occur due to the behaviour of the crowd. These events have great potential to cause safety hazards to the people. This paper attempts to narrate the typical situations of crowd dynamics observed in the Kumbh Mela procession-2016 and to describe the characteristics of the crowd that have not been reported in literature so far but have a significant impact on the crowd. Extreme crowd pressures resulting in individual loss control due to psychological and physiological factors, heterogeneity in the crowd, group behaviour and their induced competitiveness, unexpected behaviour exhibited due to the motivation behind participating in such procession makes it a typical crowd concentrated event to study the potentially critical dynamics of crowd. Physical and psychological forces acting on the people and their resulting dynamics of crowd in the Kumbh Mela procession 2016 lead to serpentine behaviour, which can possibly lead to crowd crushes, or any such crowd risk situations. Therefore, the characteristics of crowd participating in the Kumbh Mela procession have to be clearly understood so that it helps in better planning and well-organized movement patterns

Pedestrian Flow Characteristics at Upstream and Downstream of Bottleneck for Unidirectional Flow under Normal Conditions

The study of pedestrian flow characteristics at upstream and downstream of bottlenecks is important from level of service and evacuation perspective. Many controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted to study pedestrians’ behavior at bottlenecks. However, it is unclear whether experiments can reproduce real crowd flow characteristics. In this paper, real field data was collected at normal conditions for unidirectional pedestrian movement at Mahakaleshwar, a Hindu temple at Ujjain, India during Mahashivaratri, a festival day on which a large number of pilgrims visited the temple. Along the corridor there is a width reduction at a U-turn which creates a bottleneck. It is necessary to study pedestrian flow characteristics at bottlenecks to ensure desired level of service at temple premises during heavy flow. The speed-density relationships of upstream and downstream sections were compared and it was found that flow behavior at both the sections of bottleneck severely differ from each other. Pedestrians in the upstream are either at free flow speed for very low density values or moving slowly for intermediate to high range of density values. From the speed-density relationship, it can be concluded that pedestrians at upstream had visual clues of congestion ahead at bottleneck (pedestrian could also see the downstream flow through barricades). Therefore, pedestrians wait at their position, stay in their comfort zone and do not push each other. Thus, even at intermediate local density, pedestrians have such low speeds. This violates the general assumption that pedestrians change their speed only at the shockwave boundary. The movement of pedestrians at upstream is governed by local density and information of congestion status ahead, whereas pedestrian movement at downstream is governed by factors like density, side friction and pedestrians’ willingness to compensate for the delay at bottleneck. This study is expected to have application in planning and operation of pedestrian facilities

Comparison of Pedestrian Data of Single File Movement Collected from Controlled Pedestrian Experiment and from Field in Mass Religious Gathering

Managing and controlling crowd during mass religious gathering is a challenge for organizers. With good computational capabilities, it is possible to create tools to simulate crowd in real time to aid crowd management. These tools need to be first calibrated and validated with pedestrian empirical data. The empirical data collection from field is difficult and therefore, data collection through controlled pedestrian experiments have become a convenient substitute. However, the ability of experiment data to reproduce actual crowd behavior needs to be examined. This study compared the experiment data with field data collected from mass religious gathering named Kumbh Mela held in India, 2016. The single file movement (pedestrians moving along a single line; SFM) experiment was conducted and its results were compared with the field SFM results. The speed in the field was found to be generally higher than in the experiment for a given density. The results clearly indicate that the pedestrians in the field are motivated to achieve a purpose but participants in the experiments lack the motivation. The pedestrian dynamics of the experiment was found to be different from the field. Hence, the results of pedestrian experiments should not be extrapolated to understand panic, crowd risk situations

Characteristics of Stop and Go Wave in One Dimensional Interrupted Pedestrian Flow Through Narrow Channel

Pedestrian microscopic simulation models can aid crowd management only if they can reproduce the crowd behavior correctly. To calibrate and validate the model, it is important to understand crowd movement during various activities involved in mass gathering events. A common practice in such gathering is to hold attendees in waiting area in near corridors separated by crowd barriers before the event and allow entering the event only after a designated time. The crowd is released in small batches to avoid overcrowding inside. Long waiting hours, anger, excitement, competitive feeling etc. can make crowd aggressive during such entries. Crowd flow characteristics due to such behavior is difficult to recreate in pedestrian experimental studies in laboratory setting. This paper studied interrupted flow of such crowd through a narrow corridors made of strong railing channel inside a temple. Interrupted flow lead to formation of one dimensional stop and go waves. These stop and go waves were studied from the trajectory data. The average speed of waves propagating over longer distance were also estimated. The quantitative output from this study can be used to calibrate and validate simulation models of such activity during mass gathering events